Newsletter #2

Biography

To my fabulous patients;

The purpose of this website is to close the gap in understanding of the overall mission of this office, and to explain why we do what we do.

The explanation is not an easy one, nor short.

Because it is connected to who I am and what I do, I thought I would tell you my story to try and help you understand more about myself and my practice.

Our mission is simple, really. It is to improve our patient’s health and well-being.

But to do that, we must have a way to evaluate the entire body’s level of functioning and then determine how to assist the body in improving in ways that might be structural, chemical, or emotional (energetic) in nature. As my patients very quickly learn, we use techniques that are termed unconventional.

We use the manual muscle testing techniques of Applied Kinesiology to add to the diagnostic process. This allows us to determine with the very highest levels of specificity, exactly what the body needs to assist it in reclaiming the highest levels of health and function it was designed to have (from the blueprint for function on the genes).

We are doing things substantially different in our office; different than traditional Chiropractic and vastly different than the medical model of health care. When people are exposed to ‘different’, a range of things can happen:

1. At one extreme, some people have great difficulty to accept opinions or viewpoints that contradict the way they have been taught all their lives and these individuals often will reject anything new.

2. Many others are seeking out answers that will give them improved quality of life and are open minded to answers that show to work, no matter how radical they seem to be.

We all need to be skeptical in this world; partly because of the conflicting answers we obtain from the resources we seek out, but even more in that the many answers we receive may even show to be non-effective answers to health problems. It is my stance that we need to become as educated as possible to make the most informed decisions possible. Individuals need to become more responsible for their health care decisions. Too many people have given away their right of choice because they do not know how to find any other answers.

I sincerely hope that all of you can embrace this information and use it to assist you in making those important health care choices.

I would like to take this opportunity to tell a story, my story, of how I got to where I am in my current understanding and application of what I consider to be the finest model of health care available anywhere. I believe it is important for the people who I work with to understand how this came about.

My father was an Optometrist in Alexandria.I got into my mind in 8^th grade that I wanted to be a Dentist. When I got out of high school (1970), I went into the Navy to get the GI Bill for college.

I would up on a nuclear submarine as a machinist’s mate out of Charleston, S.C. We were responsible for all the non-nuclear mechanical systems on the ‘boat’. (Subs are boats; everything else is a ship.) As every submarine had billets for 2 divers to perform emergency repairs, I requested diving school and was trained as a Navy Diver. After a year or so, I requested deep-sea diving school and went to an additional 12-week school. If you ever see the guys with the big brass headdress, the canvas suit, 60 # cross weight belts, and the 20 # boots, that is what we trained in. The Navy was a great experience for me, one that I would gladly repeat given the same circumstances.

I then went to college in Morris, still intent on Dental school in the fall of ‘76. In the summer between my junior and senior years, I injured my back lifting a car. I did not know what to do and someone recommended going to a Chiropractor. I had no clue what Chiropractic was all about, but after several sessions with a local DC, I thought this was ‘good stuff’ and began thinking that I would rather pursue Chiropractic than a career in Dentistry.

My first year in Chiropractic school at Northwestern College of Chiropractic was a wake up call, as we were beset with 28 credits per term. I also found out that freshmen and sophomores were ‘treated’ by “Junior Interns”; students in their junior year. My first intern was a young lady who introduced herself and explained that she was using a chiropractic technique called Applied Kinesiology. She performed the customary chiropractic evaluations and then proceeded to do various (Applied Kinesiology) muscle tests. I understood traditional Chiropractic and had no idea that there was anything beyond it. I was not impressed! (See #1 above)

I honestly cannot recall what all she told me about her findings, but I had heard about these weird (AK) people from other students. There were many derogatory comments about the students that used AK at that time and I was not about to be duped by one of these freaks into a cultist technique. I essentially fired her as my intern (“take your voodoo bag of tricks and hit the road”) and requested a ‘real Chiropractic student’ as my junior intern. I was and continue to be the “ultimate skeptic”.

My Chiropractic education proceeded and when I was in my junior year, my best friend Steve had been ‘dabbling’ in the AK techniques, regularly attending the “AK Club”. This was a gathering of students after hours sharing and practicing (AK) manual muscle testing and its relationships to various aspects of the body. Several times he worked on me with these techniques with impressive results. I also was hearing through the grapevine that he (and others who were using this technique) were getting clinical results far superior to any of the other students.

I asked my friend once why he thought he needed this additional knowledge of AK. Why was traditional Chiropractic not enough? I will never forget his response… “Chiropractic is wonderful, but it is simply not sufficient to find the underlying causes of the problem; there is much more going on in the body”. I started finding out that as much as Chiropractic offered, that there was more, much more, to learn.

When I was a senior, I had an opportunity to take on a series of weekend seminars on Applied Kinesiology. It was the basic 120-hour course of basic AK; ten 12-hour weekends. These were given in a hotel in the metro area and I was very much awestruck by the abilities of the various levels of AK docs there. I was enormously impressed how easily these docs were able to understand (and successfully treat) many conditions that eluded even the best instructors in the school. Truly, this was something to ponder. However, I was also to find out that this journey of learning was not an easy or short one. Rather, it took time to reach a level to be able to use AK at a proficient level and use it clinically, and then, many more years to fully master.

When I got into private practice, I very much desired to begin using the AK techniques. Because I was starting a practice from scratch, in a new town (Long Prairie) I was more than challenged with merely building my practice. I attempted to use some of the newfound knowledge of AK in my work, but because of the remoteness of my location from others using the work, I gradually left it behind in favor of a more traditional Chiropractic style of practice.

Ten years later, my son injured his neck playing hockey. I seemed to be helping him, but that spring when baseball season came around, he was no longer able to throw with any strength or accuracy. I would take him back to the office repeatedly and adjust his neck, shoulder, elbow and wrist only to have the structures ‘go back out’ after a few throws. I eventually called my old buddy Steve, and brought my son down to his office in Burnsville. Steve showed me several “AK techniques” to stabilize the muscles of the neck, and my son’s neck soon stabilized.

I just happened to find out about a seminar the next weekend (some things were meant to be). It was an AK seminar on sports injuries, an afterthought from a series taught that winter. Coming home after that weekend, I promised myself that I would become knowledgeable about AK, and all that it entails.

The next fall (‘97), I registered for another 100 hour basic AK series. It was one weekend a month for 8 months. Every weekend, I would learn a block of information and return to the office for the next month to implement the newfound knowledge into my work. After the first year, I repeated the series, with the desire to fine tune what I had learned and totally master everything that was available. Many of the techniques that were taught I was not able to fully embrace until I had seen them work with absolute consistency in my practice. After all, I was the ultimate skeptic.

My practice had changed considerably by this time, and I had a totally different understanding of structural problems, in addition to a wonderful ability to evaluate organ function and employ natural medicine very effectively to meet the specific needs of the body. My clinical outcomes for helping many diverse conditions were becoming no less than astonishing. I continued to ‘practice’ with the AK procedures, benefiting from them more with each passing month with the vastly superior results I was seeing.

Since that time I have learned some advanced AK techniques that allow me to ‘communicate’ with the body and learn more about the body’s needs in three areas: Chemical, Structural and Energetic. With these techniques, we are succeeding to make the most difference for the body’s health and function that I have ever dreamed of. I do not believe that I can recall having ever been anything less than very pleasantly surprised, and I have been nicely astonished many times.

I have now been certified as a “Master of Extreme Kinesiology”. I have not included a specific description of this level of Kinesiology, but if you are interested, I would be overjoyed to e-mail you additional information on the advanced kinesiologies.